Rural – Jersey Country Life Magazine

Noirmont in the Spring

This marvellous evocation of Noirmont was written by Siobhan Fogarty. We are always pleased to receive poems, short stories, images, photos paintings inspired by Jersey’s countryside.

 

Noirmont

Dappled sunlight falling through the trees

Onto soft earth and pine needles,

Daffodil spears piercing the ground cover,

Maybe a week until their golden trumpets

Blare forth assertive colour.

 

Onto the heath, the bracken

Rusted by winter cold,

Sage-green lichen misshaping bare twisted branches.

Wind scented buttery-coconut by gorse,

Tinged with salt.

I can hardly bear the brightness of

Grass and sky washed clean overnight

Over-saturated by morning sun

Water, shining diamond-like from blades of grass

Kept military-short by armies of rabbits.
Jersey Rural Boat
Horse shoes carved into the turf,

I hear the soft thunder of galloping paws

And the dog runs past, leaping lamb-like

In sheer happiness at being alive, here, now.

The piglets in the next field squeal, outraged,

Tripping over mud, each other, themselves

To crowd around the patient mountain of their mother’s body.

 

Geometric, Bauhaus concrete fortifications,

Stark against the sky,

Left from the Occupation. After the war, the weapons

Were torn out, left the earth bleeding,

Thrown into the ocean

For water to envelop, rust, end.

Now, to keep the memory alive, they have been resurrected,

A cannon painted sky-grey,

Seemingly new, ready, waiting.

Let me come across these memories half-buried,

Emerging from the earth

Softened by time and overgrown by brambles.

 

Out on the headland, the German gun

Looks like nothing but what it is,

Slender death, pointed accusingly over the water

My eyes follow the silver sunlit path over the sea

And can see no further than the horizon.

 

By Siobhan Fogarty

 

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